benchmarks are pointless as some roundups have proved recently

[jrwood]

:disgust:

I like to read the roundups but it seems that some companies want to compare apples to oranges.

THG has admitted in his 865p article that the ASUS 875p motherboard FSB has a default speed of 202mhz and not 200mhz that the other 875p motherboards comply with. So may I suggest that the reviewers do their job properly and clock all the speeds to 200mhz so we can see the wood from the trees???

It also seems that MSI have gone one further and their bios overclocks when applications are run, I would rather have control over overclocking because adding these kind of features makes gaming more unreliable in the long term...

 

[Goi]

So far the MSI case has been an isolated one. There hasn't been any reports of other motherboard manufacturing implementing such shady overclocking techniques. I would stay away from MSI just because of this undocumented "feature".

However, as long as the information is transparent, benchmarks are still very useful in evaluating the differences between various hardware. In fact, its the only consistent way to do so.

 

[jrwood]

On another forum I posed this strange 202mhz bus speed that tomshardware highlighted, someone replied saying that their bus was at 200mhz by default. So did ASUS send THG a modified motherboard at 202mhz because they knew it was going to be benchmarked against other motherboards at 200mhz ?, I know its only 2mhz but as the benchmarks have shown it makes the ASUS come out 'top' albeit a small margin in relative terms.

 

[jrwood]

On another forum I posed this strange 202mhz bus speed that tomshardware highlighted, someone replied saying that their bus was at 200mhz by default. So did ASUS send THG a modified motherboard at 202mhz because they knew it was going to be benchmarked against other motherboards at 200mhz ?, I know its only 2mhz but as the benchmarks have shown it makes the ASUS come out 'top' albeit a small margin in relative terms.

 

[Goi]

I'm not sure of that, but its a possibility I guess.

 

[glugglug]

Actually almost every motherboard on the market today has a variable clockspeed in normal operation. Not based on CPU load like the MSI board though... Its usually a feature you can turn on and off in the BIOS it will say something about "EMI/RF noise reduction" or similar. Basically the clock speed is intentionally varying by +/- 2% to keep from causing too much radio interference at any specific frequency.